Free Puzzle of the Pepper Tree by Stuart Palmer Page B

young woman of some force. “Oh, come on, you kids. You’ve got all your lifetime to register and get a room. But you’ve never seen a ballroom like the Casino!”
    Kay Deving looked at her Marvin, and they seemed to share a secret joke between them.
    “Oh, go on dreaming, then,” Phyllis told them. “You’ll come, Miss Withers—I know you’re a sport!”
    The waiter approached with the check, and laid it ostentatiously in the middle of the table, where the men of the party stared at it.
    “Let’s make it Dutch, of course,” said Miss Withers.
    T. Girard Tompkins extended a languid hand—demonstrating where it was that motion pictures got the idea of slow-motion photography. But it was Ralph O. Tate who picked up the check and took out his wallet.
    “This circus has cost the studio a couple of grand already in wasted time,” he said. “They may as well get stuck for eleven bucks more.”
    “You’re very gracious,” Miss Withers told him.
    Tate nodded warily. But one generous gesture begets another. Before he left the table he drew from the left pocket of his vest four inexpensive cigars. “Here,” he offered, and passed them out to the captain, Tompkins, and his two assistants. Marvin Deving was smoking a cigarette.
    There was a murmuring of thanks, and then Captain Narveson sniffed his cigar and crammed it into his corncob. There was a short strained silence.
    Ralph O. Tate absently drew from the right-hand pocket of his vest a dark mottled Corona Perfecto and lit it with a gold-and-diamond lighter.
    “So long, folks,” he said. “See you through the bars.” Then he was gone—sweater, riding boots, and all.
    “Through the bars, eh?” Captain Narveson applied a fourth match to the bowl of his pipe. “From the inside, Ay bat yu!”
    The party broke up at that sally. The captain followed his pipe out toward the pier—Tompkins loudly inquired of a waiter as to the whereabouts of the washroom, and Tony and George departed with the avowed purpose of changing into their dancing clothes.
    Miss Withers made her way slowly toward the door, going around the room so as to pass by the table where she had seen the lonely figure of Barney Kelsey. But he had departed, and only a coffee cup and a solitary quarter for the waitress showed that he had been there.
    In the doorway Phyllis waited. “You know why I did it, don’t you?” she said, as Miss Withers came up. “I thought it would give you a chance to look them all over. Don’t I make a swell Dr. Watson? Notice any signs of guilt?”
    “I did not,” Miss Withers confessed. “But I wish you hadn’t told them about my going to the plane.”
    Phyllis grinned. “They knew it anyway. So I kidded them along—but I left out about Mister Jones getting sick.”
    “Bravo!” said Miss Withers. “You know, I’ve never dined like this in my life. With a red-handed murderer, perhaps, in our midst, laughing and chatting like the rest of us. I kept thinking of it—and though I ate all my dinner, I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what I had.”
    “Neither can I,” Phyllis confessed. She was looking back into the dining room, almost deserted now. “And neither can they.”
    She indicated the newlyweds, who still sat, amid the wreckage of the feast, staring into each other’s eyes, while the glares of the impatient waiters passed over their cloud-wrapped heads.
    “It’s like a disease with them,” said Hildegarde Withers.
    Phyllis turned on her. “A disease! Well, maybe you’re right. But it’s a disease I’d do anything in the world to get—if I could be like they are!”
    “Even murder?” inquired Miss Withers softly. But Phyllis La Fond did not hear.

CHAPTER VII
    “H ELL’S BELLS RINGING IN the rafters, Hell’s bells beckon …” Somewhere on the moonlit loggia a clear soprano voice caught up the tune which the orchestra in the grand ballroom was playing, and continued to the end. “All is forsaken—when roll is taken …” There